Movie ticketing website Fandango has acquired the popular film review website Rotten Tomatoes and ticketing app Flixster. Previous owner Warner Bros. will take an equity position in Fandango and become an ongoing strategic partner.

The move is a smart one for the NBCUniversal-owned Fandango, but it will be interesting to see how or if this will affect Rotten Tomatoes. The site is used by millions of moviegoers to help them determine which movies they should and shouldn’t see. Being owned by a company that is interested in selling tickets, to every movie, might not align with the goals of a consumer advisory site like Rotten Tomatoes. But then again, being owned by a mega movie group like Warner Bros. also seemed like a possible conflict of interest, and Rotten Tomatoes still managed to function rather independently of the entertainment division.

Read the full Rotten Tomatoes Fandango Flixster press release after the jump.

Now a movie studio owns the most popular review aggregation website. Is that strange? It might be strange.

A press release went out this morning announcing that Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group (which “brings together Warner Bros. Entertainment’s home video, digital distribution, interactive entertainment, technical operations and anti-piracy businesses in order to maximize current and next-generation distribution scenarios”) has purchased the movie-ranking website Flixster and, consequently, Rotten Tomatoes. (Which was bought by Flixster in January 2010.)

The move is part of a bid on WB’s part to engage digital distribution platforms. The company has already offered app editions of movies like The Dark Knight, and has begun distributing films directly through Facebook. WBHEG insists that Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes will continue to operate independently — in other words, we shouldn’t see much difference in the operation of either site, and ideally RT’s review presentation won’t be compromised. The press release is after the break. Read More »

Today Flixster launched version 3.0 of their popular iPhone application, Movies, bringing with it some very intriguing updates. Most interesting to me is the addition of Netflix support. You can now manage all of your Netflix queues through the application with an interface that surpasses many dedicated Netflix apps I’ve seen. While searching for movies, you can now easily add it to your Netflix queue.

They’ve also added the ability to purchase tickets directly from within the application (using Movietickets.com), and easy links to the iTunes store if you want to purchase the film. Also nifty is the ability to search Yelp from within the application for restaurants near theaters.